Audience:Doody's Core Titles in the Health Sciences 2018 is aimed primarily at medical, nursing, and allied health librarians around the world who are charged with making the book buying decisions for their libraries within budget guidelines.

Definition: A core title is a book or software title that represents essential knowledge needed by professionals or students in a given discipline and is highly recommended for the collection of a library that serves health sciences specialists.

Selectors: 170 professionals have participated in the selection of the titles appearing in the 2018 edition of Doody's Core Titles in the Health Sciences -- 74 Content Specialists and 94 collection development medical librarians who voluntarily served as Library Selectors, and two librarian consultants.

Process: A four-step process resulted in the selection of the titles appearing on the 2018 edition of Doody's Core Titles in the Health Sciences:

Content Specialists made initial selections of core titles for each specialty.

A panel of up to three Library Selectors (and no fewer than two) in each specialty reviewed the selections made by the Content Specialist and had the opportunity to add titles to the list.

The Library Selectors scored each title on the final list, rating each core title on a scale of 0 - 3 on five different key collection development criteria.

Library Selectors indicated which titles in each specialty are Essential Purchase Titles. Essential Purchase Titles are defined as those titles recommended for purchase by a small library.

All selection and scoring processes took place online, with unique tools built by Doody Enterprises' staff exclusively for Doody's Core Titles in the Health Sciences.

Resources: To assist Content Specialists and Library Selectors in their responsibilities and to make the selection and scoring process as convenient and time-efficient as possible, the web-based tools built for the selection process included access to the following information sources:

the titles that appeared on the 2017 Edition of Doody's Core Titles

a searchable database of all in-print book and software titles in Doody's Review Service, an aggregated database consisting of all information from Doody's database (including reviews and ratings) as well as bibliographic data on all in-print book and software titles from Matthews